Name Lydia Johnson Dance Founders Lydia Johnson Formation 1999 | Year founded 1999 Founding choreographers Lydia Johnson | |
Website www.lydiajohnsondance.org | ||
Lydia Johnson Dance is a contemporary dance company that performs the choreography of Lydia Johnson, primarily in New York City and New Jersey. It is notable for combining ballet and modern dance, sometimes isolating and reworking "components of classical ballet technique." The company was founded in 1999 by Johnson, a choreographer. She has choreographed dance works to various composers including Beethoven, the alternative rock band Cake, Philip Glass, Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, Polish composer Henryk Górecki, and others. Since 2008 the company has received annual support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Performances tend to have six or seven to twelve dancers, and the company has performed in numerous venues in New Jersey and New York City, and it is based in northern New Jersey. In addition, Lydia Johnson Dance runs a school to teach dance and choreography.
Contents
Reviews
Critics have described the company's performances as infusing "ballet with a contemporary sensibility," romantic, handsome, with a calm deliberateness, and invoking a "harmonious world." A New Yorker critic described her performances as "simple, tasteful, and unhurried." A dance critic described a performance as "the most organic choreographic fusion of ballet and modern-dance techniques ever invented," and wrote:
... Lydia Johnson has created a tasty cocktail of dance vocabulary that looks markedly original and feels very naturally blended. ... A quartet of women in partnership with four folding chairs created ravishing tableaux of crystalline linearity...
New York Times critic Jennifer Dunning wrote that Johnson created "a sense of life flowing unhurriedly over mysterious human stories." Dunning described one performance as having a "strangely cool, crisp eloquence" in the way that Johnson's dancers used their arms.
Dance instruction
Lydia Johnson Dance has a dance school for children of all ages. Classes in ballet, dance, hip hop, and choreography are held at venues such as the Burgdorff Cultural Center in Maplewood. In addition, a dance camp of several weeks duration is offered during the summer for children from first through tenth grades. Company members sometimes serve as mentors to students. At the end of a semester, students present dances they have choreographed.